As usual school took priority, leaving this site pretty destitute. However it was worth it, did well in my courses this term. Now that I've had a few days break though I've been up to some coding. My second foray into python has resulted in a very basic console irc client which can be found here. It requires the python irc client library found here. And if you are on windows like I am, you will also need the curses (based on pdcurses) library which can be found here.

I think the fun part of python is that yesterday I didn't know that irc library or curses, yet today I have a working program with both of them. Brings back some of the nostaligia of when I was first programming, hacking out things in a few hours or days. Somehow someway python captures that spirit. While I doubt I will abandon c# / c++ for it, my explorations of python continue to be enjoyable.

Deleter

-2010-11-16-

Taking a short break from the website to improve my css and javascript knowledge. Decided to mess around with html5+canvas. So far I like it. It's obviously a new platform with a lot of short falls, but there is a giddy sense of accomplishment every time you get one of the basic concepts to work. So far I've managed to make a scrolling background, a bouncing box, and little red boxes that spawn when you move your mouse and fall off the screen. If you want you can check it out here. Not sure how much further I'll take it, but I might make a full game out of it.

Deleter

-2010-11-13-

There's still a lot of features to be added, but the initial version of Hats By Nicole is now up, check it out!

Deleter

-2010-11-07-

Turns out that the paypal shipping options are not as flexible as they want to appear. For example, if you create a 'pickup from shop' shipping option with a $0 charge (obviously), then as long as this option can be applied to the customer's region, its selected by default and not even labeled. Why on earth it works this way I have no idea. Also, rather than making shipping management be easy, ie shipping cost x number of items, if you want to do this, you have to do it individually for each item you want to sell, what a pain. I feel like its made to look all friendly and full of options, but any more advanced users are expected to make their own store anyway, or choose a 3rd party store. I have no problem with this, but then why bother putting in what feels like a feebly-attempted implementation of these more advanced options?

Deleter

-2010-11-06-

Paypal integration - so far has been really easy to do. It has more features than I was expecting too, with multiple options surrounding inventory management, shipping, taxing, etc. Looks like the site should be up in no time.

Deleter

-2010-10-26-

Another day, another doctype, my major issues with CSS have been resolved and slowly the website is coming into shape. I now know more about doctypes and will choose mine more carefully in the future. Also, SQL is great, when they work, queries can feel like magic. Nothing extremely useful to report besides the slow march of progress.

Deleter

-2010-10-26-

Worked for decent # of hours on my sister's site for her crocheted hat business. I have to admit that css + html feel so primitive and poorly implemented compared to WPF. The fact that every browser is free to interpret, ignore, or just flat out not support layout features at random is unbelievable. WPF and xaml may have their flaws, but at least when I write down code I have a fairly good idea whats going to come out the other side... Thats enough ranting for now, I will be finishing the page in the next couple of days and shall link it then. In the meantime, ciao!

Deleter

-2010-10-18-

Spent a couple hours making a macro-tastic excel sheet that I can use for time accounting. The idea is to get better at predicting how long tasks will take by recording my estimates vs actuals. Next: itero!

So I've decided to start using this site as more of a development blog of types (rather than just a very infrequently updated 'news'). We'll see how that goes.

On the development side of things, I've decided to learn wxWidgets in c++. I'll start with the hello world app and build up from there. I have very little knowledge of how it works, or really how any GUI library works, so it's going to be an adventure. Hopefully I'll arrive on the other side with another tool in my belt, and perhaps an application to show off as well.